The Venetian eighteenth century is the strangest part of the republic's history. It was a century in which a once-imperial maritime power, having lost the empire and the trade routes that had built it, did not collapse. It did not modernise. It did not reform. It did not industrialise. It did not seek alliances. It did not enlarge its army. It did not abolish the patriciate. It did not, despite repeated French and Habsburg invitations to do so, take sides in any of the great wars that consumed continental Europe between 1700 and 1797. Instead, it pursued the most unusual foreign policy in European history: armed neutrality combined with cultural saturation. It was — for the seventy years between the end of the Morean War in 1718 and the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1796 — the most peaceful, the most pleasure-loving, and the most musically and pictorially productive society in Europe. And then it collapsed, in a single afternoon, without firing a shot.
The decision not to act
The strategic doctrine of armed neutrality was, by the early eighteenth century, the explicit policy of the Senate. The republic still had a fleet — about thirty galleys and a dozen ships of the line — but the fleet was, increasingly, ceremonial. The army on the terraferma was perhaps thirty thousand men, mostly mercenaries (Schiavoni, Croats, German Lutheran cavalry, Italian infantry), commanded by patrician colonels with limited combat experience. The republic's diplomats — particularly its ambassadors at Vienna, Paris, Madrid and Istanbul — spent the century explaining to the great powers that Venice would not join them. The explanations were generally accepted. The great powers found Venetian neutrality useful as a clearing-house for diplomatic communication, and besides, Venice was no longer worth attacking. There were richer victims elsewhere.
This was, when one considers what could have happened, a substantial diplomatic achievement. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the War of the Polish Succession (1733–38), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the Seven Years' War (1756–63), and the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79) all involved most of Venice's neighbours and at various points threatened to draw the republic in. It was not drawn in. The constitution, with its caution and its institutional procrastination, was particularly suited to a foreign policy of refusal. By the time a proposal had passed the Senate, the Council of Ten and the Maggior Consiglio, the war had usually moved on.
Carnival
Inside this protected diplomatic bubble, the city of Venice became — without quite intending to — the principal pleasure destination of the European aristocracy. The Carnival, technically the period from the 26th of December to Shrove Tuesday, expanded informally to cover something close to six months of every year. By 1750 there were at any given time perhaps thirty thousand foreign visitors in the city, in a metropolitan population of about 140,000. Hotels, gambling halls (called ridotti), opera houses, theatres, courtesans' parlours and rented gondolas multiplied to accommodate them. The masked anonymity of the carnival — the simple white mask, the bauta, was legal as everyday dress for the entire Carnival period — created an environment of social and sexual permissiveness that scandalised conservative observers from Calvinist Geneva to papal Rome.
The state was, on the whole, in favour of all this. The visitor revenue substantially financed the public budget. The opera houses (San Cassiano, the Teatro San Moisè, the Teatro San Benedetto, the Teatro San Samuele, eventually La Fenice, opened in 1792) commissioned and performed perhaps four hundred new operas per decade — more than any other European city. The Venetian school of painters (Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, Longhi, Bellotto) produced what is arguably the last unified flowering of Italian Renaissance pictorial culture. The Venetian composers (Vivaldi, the Marcello brothers, Albinoni, Galuppi) were among the most prolific of their century. Antonio Vivaldi alone — a priest, a violin teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà girls' orphanage, and a composer of perhaps five hundred concertos and forty operas — was the single most published composer in early eighteenth-century Europe.
The Pietà and the orphanage choirs
One of the strangest and most distinctive Venetian institutions of the eighteenth century was the four ospedali — charitable orphanages for foundlings and abandoned girls — each of which maintained, at considerable state expense, a celebrated all-female orchestra and choir. The Pietà (where Vivaldi taught), the Mendicanti, the Incurabili and the Derelitti competed with each other for the best teachers, the most ambitious compositions and the most distinguished audiences. Tourists made pilgrimage to attend their Sunday vespers. The girls performed from behind a wrought-iron grille — they were nuns of a kind, never visible — and Charles Burney, the English musicologist visiting in 1770, considered the Pietà choir's sound the finest he had heard anywhere in Europe.
The ospedali were also, although nobody quite framed it this way, the closest thing to a women's conservatoire in Europe. They taught girls who would otherwise have been street labourers to play violin, oboe, viola, cello, bass, harpsichord, trumpet and organ, to read and compose music, to sing solo parts in oratorios, and — when their voices and instrumental ability allowed — to make a living from teaching after they left the institutions in their early twenties.
The slow exhaustion
Beneath the surface of carnival, music and tourism, the republic was running down. The political class — the inscribed nobility of the Golden Book — had been shrinking for two centuries, partly through deliberate restrictions on new entries, partly through demographic attrition. By 1797 only about a thousand patricians were eligible to sit in the Maggior Consiglio, of whom perhaps half were too poor to bear the expense of office. The proceedings of the Council had become procedurally calcified to the point of paralysis. Foreign reforms — Joseph II's in Austria, the Bourbon reforms in Naples, the various French reforms before the Revolution — were not imitated. Industry on the terraferma had not been modernised. The Arsenal was still building galleys of an eighteenth-century pattern essentially identical to those of 1500. The mainland tax base was eroding because the patrician administrators on the terraferma were unwilling to alienate the local urban elites of Padua, Verona or Brescia, and consequently failed to extract the revenue an effective Habsburg or Bourbon governor would have extracted.
The result was a state whose institutions worked, whose finances did not collapse, whose population was on the whole content, and whose military and economic capacity were declining at a rate just slow enough to remain unalarming year by year. The republic did not feel, to its citizens, like a country in terminal decline. It felt like a country at peace. Voltaire wrote, in 1764, that "Venice is the only state which has, of its own will, made peace its profession; and for this it deserves the honours of antiquity". Goethe, visiting in 1786, found the city "like a beautiful old woman who has not noticed that her time is passing".
What ended it was a younger man, in a hurry, with a bigger army.
End of Chapter VIII